Electronic communications are important to business and personal relationships. Individuals can make contact through a variety of media, such as land-line telephones, cellular telephones, e-mail, personal data assistants and other computing devices, as well as by meeting at physical locations. Each medium can have unique contact information, including, for example, home telephone numbers, cellular telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, home addresses, work addresses, web addresses, and the like. Maintaining contact information associated with electronic communication devices of multiple contacts can require a written or electronic store of contact information. Additionally, as the number of contacts increases, it becomes more useful to sort the contacts into collections.
Paper-based address books are increasingly displaced by electronic versions. Yet, the variety of electronic contact information storage methods can present challenges. While contact information can be stored at individual devices, such as personal data assistants, cell phones, etc., they may not be replicated on all such devices. Thus, a user may not be able to communicate with a certain contact from an available device, unless the user can remember the necessary contact information. Moreover, the user may not be able to accommodate other individuals who request contact information for one or more of the user's contacts, unless one or all of the user's electronic devices are present. Hence, there is a need in the art to centralize storage and organization of contact information and to publish contact information to other individuals from such centralized storage.